To balance out all the Clonakilty fun, we stayed in a quiet self-catering cottage and went to bed early. Our plan was to check out the scenery and get plenty of fresh air. I had even contacted the local bike shop about renting bikes. But with steady showers, tall hedges, and the best views being from in between grazing cows in a field, it seemed like walking was a better plan.
Brian drove our trusty Micra out to the Beara peninsula, where we found some Bronze Age wedge tombs and stone circles, a manor house that had been burned down during the revolution in 1921, and Ireland's only cable car out to Dorsey Island.
On our second day out in West Cork, our eighth wedding anniversary, we took a ferry from the town of Baltimore out to Cape Clear island. We hiked around for most the day, checked out the coastal views and the O'Driscoll castle, and saw a seal in the harbor on our way back. That night we tried to go to the pub in the nearest village for dinner. It was closed. We tried the next village - everything was closed there too. Finally, we made it the town of Skibbereen which had both a pub and a Chinese take-out place open. We were in luck. Last year on our wedding anniversary we flew to Istanbul and ate falafels on the sidewalk. I consider myself very lucky. Some people just go to the Macaroni Grill.
The sun came out on our third day in the country and we went to lighthouse at Mizen Head, at the tip of the Mizen Peninsula. The cliffs are spectacular, and they have also caused a lot of shipwrecks over the centuries. And we saw more wedge tombs.
Finally we hiked near Lough Hyne, a marine nature preserve. It's a salt water lake that fills up during high tide but is landlocked at low tide. We climbed up to see the best views.
We were certainly off the tourist track on this trip. We were away from the major attractions and it's the off-season, so a lot of hotels and restaurants were closed. There was not a sweater shop or a leprechaun hat in sight. On the drive back to Dublin we stopped for lunch in Kinsale, and were reminded of what we were missing. Kinsale is a tourist town and has been for a few hundred years. It has a beautiful harbor and lots of cafes and souvenir shops. Brian and I guessed that besides us, there was a bus full of American tourists and a bus full of British tourists, and maybe some Germans thrown in the mix. I usually defend fellow Americans, especially those who travel, but they can also be really embarassing. Here's the conversation we witnessed at lunch:
Older American man in shorts tries to order Jameson from the waitress. It's 11:45am. Then he turns to the people at the next table and says, "HOW'S THE FISH AND CHIPS?" They speak quietly so he thinks they must be Irish. "IS IT THE BEST IN TOWN?" (he is, of course, really loud). They say oh yes, it's good, or something like that. He detects a non-American accent. "ARE YOU LOCAL?" No, they are from South Wales. "WE'RE FROM NEW JERSEY, UNITED STATES." They probably know that New Jersey is in the United States, even if he doesn't know where Wales is.
Suddenly I was extra happy that we had spent our trip among some actual locals, or at least away from most tourists. I was happy to give up the sweater shops and instead watch soccer on TV while eating at the only pub open Skibbereen. As for our friend from New Jersey, he might have been happier at the Macaroni Grill.
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